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Post-Useful Misfits

Thomas Jones: Mick Herron’s Spies, 19 October 2023

The Secret Hours 
by Mick Herron.
Baskerville, 393 pp., £22, September, 978 1 3998 0053 2
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... boss. But we mustn’t forget that earlier in his career he spent many years behind the Berlin Wall, and once a spy, always a spy: perhaps the offensive face that Lamb presents to the world is a form of cover, like a superhero’s alter ego, and beneath all those filthy layers he’s a lamb with a heart of gold. (Like a superhero, too, he can when ...

Main Man

Michael Hofmann, 7 July 1994

Walking Possession: Essays and Reviews 1968-1993 
by Ian Hamilton.
Bloomsbury, 302 pp., £20, May 1994, 0 7475 1712 6
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Gazza Italia 
by Ian Hamilton.
Granta, 188 pp., £5.99, May 1994, 0 14 014073 5
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... poetry. The title poem ‘The Visit’: They’ve let me walk with you As far as this high wall. The placid smiles Of our new friends, the old incurables, Pursue us lovingly. Their boyish, suntanned heads, Their ancient arms Outstretched, belong to you. Although your head still burns Your hands remember me. There is an echo of Yeats (impossible to ...

Crisis at Ettrick Bridge

William Rodgers, 12 October 1989

A Short History of the Liberal Party 1900-88 
by Chris Cook.
Macmillan, 216 pp., £9.95, August 1989, 0 333 44884 7
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Against Goliath 
by David Steel.
Weidenfeld, 318 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 9780297796787
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Labour’s Decline and the Social Democrats’ Fall 
by Geoffrey Lee Williams and Alan Lee Williams.
Macmillan, 203 pp., £29.50, July 1989, 0 333 46541 5
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Penhaligon 
by Annette Penhaligon.
Bloomsbury, 262 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 7475 0501 2
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Citizens’ Britain: A Radical Agenda for the 1990s 
by Paddy Ashdown.
Fourth Estate, 159 pp., £5.95, September 1989, 1 872180 45 0
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... voters. The Liberals had lived too long in a political ghetto. They had ceased to worry about the wall because there seemed little prospect of breaking out. Only a brilliant flair for publicity, which often turned private occasions into public events – to the irritation of the SDP – kept their flame alight. Later experience in discussing the division of ...

The Thief and the Trousers

Owen Bennett-Jones: John Stonehouse disappears, 21 April 2022

Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy 
by Julian Hayes.
Robinson, 384 pp., £25, July 2021, 978 1 4721 4654 0
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John Stonehouse, My Father: The True Story of the Runaway MP 
by Julia Stonehouse.
Icon, 384 pp., £10.99, May, 978 1 78578 819 2
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... he was extradited back to the UK, where he recruited a barrister to represent him, the young Geoffrey Robertson. Robertson later recalled that Stonehouse had by this point ‘lost faith in socialism, he’d lost faith in himself, he’d lost faith in the political process … and there was suddenly a loss of belief in all the portentous things he’d ...

At Ramayan Shah’s Hotel

Deborah Baker: Calcutta, 23 May 2013

Calcutta: Two Years in the City 
by Amit Chaudhuri.
Union, 307 pp., £16.99, February 2013, 978 1 908526 17 5
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... never been to India, I came equipped with V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilisation and Geoffrey Moorhouse’s rather more upbeat and engaging Calcutta. My mother, arriving for the wedding, looked around and seemed to grasp things rather more directly. ‘You must really love him,’ she said. In appearance the city was circling the drain. Entire ...

Retrochic

Keith Thomas, 20 April 1995

Theatres of Memory. Vol. I: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture 
by Raphael Samuel.
Verso, 479 pp., £18.95, February 1995, 0 86091 209 4
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... in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not an island. It would be ...

For the hell of it

Terry Eagleton: Norberto Bobbio, 22 February 2001

In Praise of Meekness: Essays on Ethics and Politics 
by Norberto Bobbio, translated by Teresa Chataway.
Polity, 186 pp., £50, October 2000, 0 7456 2309 3
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... clear that this is the case with the urge to boil infants alive. If Marx believes with an off-the-wall libertarian like D.H. Lawrence that all our powers should be realised just because they are ours, then he is guilty of a naive naturalism; but if he does not hold such a disreputable view, then he has to name some criteria by which we select suitable ...

It Migrates to Them

Jeremy Harding: The Coming Megaslums, 8 March 2007

Planet of Slums 
by Mike Davis.
Verso, 228 pp., £15.99, March 2006, 1 84467 022 8
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Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb 
by Mike Davis.
Verso, 228 pp., £12.99, March 2007, 978 1 84467 132 8
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... invasion of Iraq? For an answer, Davis quotes a 1995 article by the Fort Leavenworth researcher Geoffrey Demarest: potentially the ‘dispossessed’ in general; ‘excluded populations’ everywhere; ‘criminal syndicates’; slum children coming of age (ripe for child soldiering as religious martyrs or warlord cannon fodder). In short, the extremely poor ...

Old Literature and its Enemies

Claude Rawson, 25 April 1991

The Death of Literature 
by Alvin Kernan.
Yale, 230 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 0 300 04783 5
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Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition 
by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Duckworth, 241 pp., £12.95, August 1990, 0 7156 2337 0
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Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man 
by David Lehman.
Poseidon, 318 pp., $21.95, February 1991, 0 671 68239 3
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... now writes, not the author, in Heidegger’s famous phrasing.’ He believes that because Geoffrey Hartman ‘has argued provocatively that criticism today is at least as creative as contemporary literature,’ the notion has become a fact of the culture: ‘Criticism almost single-handedly, the writers seemingly having nothing to say in the ...

The Things about Bayley

Nicholas Spice, 7 May 1987

The Order of Battle at Trafalgar, and other essays 
by John Bayley.
Collins Harvill, 224 pp., £12, April 1987, 0 00 272848 6
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... he treated the views of his pupils. His approach to a work was like that of someone tapping a wall to find out where it is unsound, or like the bell-makers at the end of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev who test the integrity of the newly-fired bell by tapping the cast with hammers and listening. What Bayley was listening for was the note of personality, and ...

The Swaddling Thesis

Thomas Meaney: Margaret Mead, 6 March 2014

Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War 
by Peter Mandler.
Yale, 366 pp., £30, March 2013, 978 0 300 18785 4
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... of whose members were also her lovers: Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Reo Fortune, Gregory Bateson, Geoffrey Gorer. In retracing the exploits of this scholarly ménage à plusieurs, and in recovering their ideas alongside their passions, Mandler has captured a defining moment in the history of American anthropology, when it refashioned itself under the ...

Plimsoll’s Story

Stephen Sedley, 28 April 2011

The Oxford History of the Laws of England 1820-1914: Vol. XI, English Legal System; Vol. XII, Private Law; Vol. XIII, Fields of Development 
edited by William Cornish et al.
Oxford, 3571 pp., £495, February 2010, 978 0 19 925883 3
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... doyen of them, William Cornish, has a distinguished record both as a legal historian – his and Geoffrey Clark’s Law and Society in England 1750-1950 remains an important work – and as an authority on intellectual property, on which he contributes an excellent section linking controversy and change in the law to economic interest and scientific ...

Rolling Back the Reformation

Eamon Duffy: Bloody Mary’s Church, 7 February 2008

... the religious life of England. That damning appraisal was most clearly set out in the late Geoffrey Dickens’s The English Reformation (1964), which dominated the historiography for thirty years. Dickens distilled his overwhelmingly negative picture into the claim that the Marian regime, bedevilled by an ‘arid legalism’, had ‘failed to discover ...

Born of the age we live in

John Lanchester, 6 December 1990

Stick it up your punter! The Rise and Fall of the ‘Sun’ 
by Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie.
Heinemann, 372 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 0 434 12624 1
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All played out: The True Story of Italia ’90 
by Pete Davies.
Heinemann, 471 pp., £14.99, October 1990, 0 434 17908 6
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Gazza! A Biography 
by Robin McGibbon.
Penguin, 204 pp., £3.99, October 1990, 9780140148688
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... poofters?’ The Pacesetters stuck pictures of male nudes up on what became known as the ‘Willie Wall’; the Sun began to run its regular pornographic ‘Page Three’ photograph in November 1970. Pictures would go from the picture desk to the photographic department to be retouched, ‘with scribbled instructions to “remove mole” or “make jawline ...

D&O

John Lanchester, 5 June 1997

Journals 1990-92 
by Anthony Powell.
Heinemann, 238 pp., £20, May 1997, 0 434 00430 8
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... with a bar running all along one side of it and some tables and a few divans. The windows in the wall opposite the bar were all open, but they looked out onto a well, so that the room was really quite stuffy and there was a smell of ammonia. Several people they knew were sitting at tables or up at the bar, but they found a place to themselves in the corner ...

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